1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the field of communications, and in particular to protecting content on mobile wireless communications devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many mobile devices contain data that would be considered “sensitive,” such as the contents of e-mail messages, names and e-mail addresses of contacts, the times and locations of meetings, etc. As a result, existing methods may be used to protect the user's sensitive data when the device is in a “locked” state by storing this data in an encrypted form in the user's file system.
If the user's data is completely encrypted when the user's device is locked, applications on the device cannot have access to the data when the device is locked. Otherwise, if there could at any time be data in the user's file system that is not encrypted, the device cannot be truly deemed securely “locked”.
This effectively forces all applications on the device to stop what they are doing when the device enters a “locked” state, since they will no longer be able to access their data. For example, if an application is in the process of sorting a list of sensitive data, it will not be able to continue with the sorting operation until the device is unlocked. This could increase the complexity of the application considerably, since it would have to take the “lock state” of the device into consideration when determining when any operation could take place and since a device lock can be initiated at any time (e.g., by a timeout, or manually by the user).